This is a repost from the Windows Phone Developer Blog. It’s great news for those waiting for the WP 7.8 release as well as developers interested in sprucing up their apps to take advantage of the new functionality, such as Live Tile resizing and such. Here is the original post.

“Today we are releasing the Windows Phone SDK Update for Windows Phone 7.8, an optional update that adds two new Windows Phone 7.8 emulator images to your existing SDK installation. These two emulator images should enable you to fully test how your Windows Phone 7.5 app’s Live Tiles will look and behave when they are run on a device running Windows Phone 7.8. New phones with Windows Phone 7.8 are beginning to ship, so it’s a great time to update your apps to take advantage of the new Live Tile experience and to reach the new markets that Windows Phone 7.8 makes available.

“This video series will help aspiring Windows Phone 7 developers get started. We’ll start off with the basics and work our way up, so in a few hours you will know enough to build simple WP7 applications, such as a GPS aware note taking application. We’ll walk you through getting the tools, knowing what an if statement is, to using the GPS built into the phone and much more!”

The videos are just my speed, slow, well thought out, and Bob does a great job of explaining WHY to do something rather than just dropping in 200 lines of code from a snippet and telling you, “it’s just basic stuff, we won’t cover this”.

If you are new to programming, particularly C#, XAML, and Windows Phone, I think you’ll find this series of videos very helpful. He starts you off with the very basics and works up to developing a note application.

There was a great post today on the Windows Phone Developer Blog regarding app submission. The highlight of the post was the added ability to associate multiple XAPs with the same app GUID. I won’t copy the entire post here, but below are a few things you need to think about when submitting your apps. This is straight from the post on WPDB. Check out the full blog post here.

“Here’s how to decide on your approach:

If you already have a Windows Phone 7 app and don’t want to take advantage of the new app functionality available in Windows Phone 8, you can choose to leave your app as it is. Windows Phone 8 devices are designed to run existing Windows Phone 7 apps. Therefore, your app will be visible to all Windows Phone users, including Windows Phone 8 users. We do recommend that you test your 7.x app in the Windows Phone 8 emulator, to confirm that it works properly.

If you already have a Windows Phone 7 app and want to leverage the exciting new Windows Phone 8 features, expanded markets, and languages of the Windows Phone 8 platform, you can upgrade your app to Windows Phone 8 and maintain the existing app GUID. However, please note that this will result in your app not being visible for users of Windows Phone 7 devices.

The final option is to add a second XAP to the app GUID of your Windows Phone 7 app. Just make a copy of your 7.x XAP and then upgrade the copied XAP to Windows Phone 8. In Dev Center you will now see an Add new option on the Upload your XAP page. This allows you to add additional XAPs to the app that have different binaries and their own long descriptions.”

This is pretty incredible, from a post on the IEEE Computer Society‘s Facebook page. I think we take for granted the complexity of the Internet as a whole. Billions of man/woman hours have gone into building out and maintaining the Internet and related technologies. What a wonderful world.

“Thanks to the Internet Engineering Task Force, whose working groups have kept the Internet running smoothly since the IETF was formed on 16 January 1986. Below is an Opte project visualization of Internet routing paths.”

Today, Leap Motion, the creators of the Leap Motion Controller, announced an exclusive partnership with Best Buy to sell the Leap Motion Controller in its stores and online. The LMC is some awesome technology that is sure to change how we interact with our devices for many years to come.